Book Blog
April 29, 2024
ou’ll notice that I’ve picked up reviews again. With my two week vacation in Amsterdam and my blogging about it, I really didn’t have time for book reviews. Well, I’ve got a stack to get through so even though it’s late, let’s get started. So Taylor Anderson’s Deadly Shores is the ninth book in the Destroyermen series. In this one, the world gets bigger as we learn more about the reptilian grik locations in Africa, hints about another race further north along the western coast, and possibly more allies beyond the South American Dons. Yes, the book is busy. Unlike […]
March 24, 2024
his is one of my puzzled reviews. Rachel Cantor’s A Highly Unlikely Scenario was an odd little read. You can figure this by the sub-title included: “A Nestsa Pixxs Employee’s Guide to saving the World”. So Leonard is the pizza employee, and he handles call center duties in a futuristic world where fast food corporations run everything. He’s feeling a little bad about his old Jewish grandfather, whom he kinda ridiculed and chided in the last years of his life. And then, suddenly, Leonard gets a call from someone who is in prison. The calls keeps coming in – even […]
March 17, 2024
kay, a book by the guy who wrote Ready Player One, which was made into a movie that bore little resemblance to it. In this novel, we have another cast-off modern kid with absent daddy issues, Zach Lightman, who loves the late-sixties and seventies gaming world. Of course, while he is well-versed in older games, he is an Ace-of-the-Base in the modern game “Armada”. It’s a game that pits the main character (in a drone fighter) (which makes a lot more sense than wasting a perfectly good human) (kudos to author Ernest Cline for this point) against an enemy armada […]
March 10, 2024
his was an interesting one, and the sub-title, The Fall of and Empire and the Fate of America makes it even more-so. And no, this is not a work of fiction. Here, author Cullen Murphy takes apart history (particularly of the Roman Empire through 400 AD and beyond. The obvious drive – Rome fell, and are we falling the same way? Well, it might not be the same, not really. After all, the Roman borders were indeed far away and news took forever to travel. Now, events that occur are available across the American Empire instantaneously, without control and sometimes […]
March 3, 2024
ne of the things that stuck with me in the movie The Flim Flam man (set in the “old South” at the end of the fifties) was the railroads. You saw L&N, Southern, and even Monon trains doing their small-town switching in their rural ways. I was reminded of it in Extra South, a wonderful book by author H. Reid. Here he focuses (in anecdote and pictures) of what the mid-to-late century was like on the sleepy lines of the South. From sugar cane railroads to tiny branch lines, even the railroad that went to Virginia Tech (my Alma mater, served […]
February 25, 2024
ooookay. So this was a weird one. I was talking books with a surgery-follow-up doctor and I asked for a recommendation (as a reader, it is the most precious gift I can grant another reader). This female doc was listening to this book on audible and really liked it. You be the judge. So Butcher & Blackbird is chick-lit at its most extreme. The two characters (kinda from the title, but properly named Sloane and Rowan) are both serial killers. To make them sympathetic, their victims are the lowest of society – other serial killers if they can, drug dealers […]
February 19, 2024
eesh. So here we are on book eight of this series. The world (and cast of characters) keeps expanding with the realization of the existence of a new race (South Africa), mounted riders led by (of all things) a Czech (in Northern India) and a crazy change to our world over in the Dominion area (over in South America). So we resolve India and the double stalemate there (and nobody seems happy about it), our wonder weapons – those P-40s – finally get deployed (that was fun). And the crazy Silva gets to break more things (as he is prone […]
February 12, 2024
ound this one in a coffee shop/game store, the same place I found “Lupin III“. This one was an early work from Hayao Miyazaki (yeah, the Spirited Away, Porco Rosso, Kiki’s Delivery Service guy). This one is set in a world very much like Valley of the Wind, very open, very vast, with ruins and left-over tech littering the landscape. The characters are Tibetan in appearance (just like Valley). They even have the riding elks, always a classic. Anyway, in this, a young prince wanders to the west, looking for seed stock to replace his villages worn-out seeds. It’s all […]
February 4, 2024
he seventh book in the Destroyermen series finds (finally) that the author has given us a break and actually included a list of characters in the front (eleven pages – that’s how big this war has become). So in the west, the first fleet in this “prehistoric” world battles to take India from the monstrous Grik, only to overextend and be encircled. An airlift keeps them supplied, but how long can they hold out? Meanwhile, in the east, the English based out of the Hawaiian islands continue the war with the Doms (Spanish time-castaways who have infested South America with […]
January 21, 2024
ne of my most influential books on my writing and storytelling was Richard Adams’ Watership Down. While the story is reviewed by me HERE, it is, in a nutshell, a story of an epic quest and a stirring battle as a band of rabbits leave a doomed warren for their holy high ground, which is Watership Down (a hillock in England). Anyone I respect as a reader has cracked this one open. Great story. I even convinced a mother and her daughter to read it as related HERE. Got a Christmas card from them and they have completed (and loved […]